Category Archives: CRM

Lot’s of questions about Dynamics 365 and SPLA. Here are a few frequently asked questions to help solve the mystery.

I’m having difficulty keeping track of all the changes at Microsoft. If I reported CRM prior to the new Dynamics 365 SKU’s in SPLA, can I continue to report the way I did prior to the change?

Yes. Service Providers who reported CRM before can continue to do so until your agreement expires. Once you renew, you can start reporting the transition SKU’s a lower cost through October 2019.

How does the new SKU’s correlate to the old SKU’s in CRM?

There’s no 1-1 ratio with older CRM products and the new Dynamics 365 products. Some of the features that are included with Dynamics 365 are not found in some of the older products. Let me provide an example, if a hoster offered CRM 2016 Pro, they would have to stack licenses to get all the functionality. To be specific, they would have to report EMT-00648 and ENJ-00826.

But what would happen if I was reporting Basic?

You would also be required to stack licenses to get all the functionality. Specifically, you would need EMT-00649 and ENJ-00827 to cover everything.

Why the change?

It’s a clever move to get end users to transition to CRM Online in my humble opinion.

Ok. But I didn’t have customers on CRM prior to the change. Can I still report old SKU’s.

According to Microsoft, you must report the new Dynamics 365 products.

I would like to use the new Social Engagement feature within CRM. How do I activate in SPLA?

Although the Social Engagement feature can be enabled for on premise CRM deployments, I “believe” they are assuming the customer already purchased an Dynamics Online subscription. In other words, in order to obtain Social Engagement, the customer would require an online subscription. Would love to know if this is different 🙂

For Dynamics hosters worried about all the changes with CRM have until October 31, 2019 to license the transition SKU’s in SPLA.

Although good news and provides some flexibility, the transition pricing is still higher than current CRM licenses. As an example, Basic CRM SKU transition pricing for Customer Service is almost double!

Transition pricing is available to ease transition to the new Dynamics 365 pricing model. It is also designed for current CRM customers, not new customers. To learn more about Dynamics 365, please check out Dynamics 365 Licensing for SPLA

For anyone that has ever worked with CRM understands it is not the easiest technology to deploy. It integrates with other applications and is becoming a must-have for sales organizations. Where there’s difficulty, comes opportunity for SPLA providers.

CRM for Microsoft SPLA has a few new flavors to align with CRM Online. Similar to Lync, SharePoint, and Exchange, each one comes with different functionality. The flavors under SPLA are the following: CRM Service Provider Edition (it’s the Professional Edition for hosted environments), CRM Essentials (formerly ESS), and CRM Basic (Formerly CRM limited). The actual SKU’s are listed below. For a complete summary of the differences, please check the SPUR, I also found this article on the CRM Online website (CRM Online)

From a licensing perspective, it is licensed by user (SAL) and does require SQL and Windows. Check out my other posts around those offerings and licensing guidance. What’s interesting about CRM is it does not require the service provider to be Dynamics authorized as is the case with Great Plains and other Dynamics offerings. As indicated at the beginning, CRM does require expertise (especially hosting it) but can be very profitable. Once you deploy CRM, you can add other solutions such as Exchange and SharePoint to be a one stop shop for hosted solutions. To install CRM, the license key code will be embedded in the software. Download the media from the VLSC website (see “License Keys and Media” post). It’s a pretty thick file, be patient.

If you have a CRM offering, would love to learn more about it. Hit me up on LinkedIn at the top right of this screen.